It’s funny how much the weather in Northeast PA can change from day to day. It can get COLLLLD here.

Yesterday, I trained for 3 hours in my garage, freezing my ass off the whole time. I was wearing sweat pants, a long-sleeve thermal shirt, two tee-shirts under that, and had a stocking cap on. To top it all off I had an Amish heater humming in the background all the while.

It seemed unseasonably cold for the first weekend in November. Flash forward 24 hours…

Today, I looked out the window around 10 AM and realized that it was probably the most gorgeous Sunday I have seen in months. It rained most of the summer and I never once got a weekend to do any atlas stone lifting.

I have been wanting to lift stones so bad that I took a look at my to-do list and decided I was going to take advantage of the extraordinary weather and do some killer kettlebell training and some serious stone lifting.

I started out with some dynamic warm-up, including foam roller, hindu push-ups, windmills, and some lunge reaches. I have doing a lot of dynamic warm-up lately and it has really been helping me out with my back pain. If you are having back pain, I suggest you look for opportunities to improve your warm-up practices and your post-workout flexibility routines.

After the warm-up, I took our 95-lb kettlebell outside and started to ramp-up. I knew I wanted to do some juggling stuff, so I started out with some cleans and some snatches to knock the rust off. From there I started out with some basic juggles – forward flips, backward flips, side flips, forward flips into a snatch, side flips into a snatch and finally worked up to a double forward flip into a snatch.

All of this with the 95-lb’er. My endurance is down for flipping and juggling, but as far as the technique, it didn’t seem to hard to get back into the swing of things.

From there, I started working on the atlas stones. I love training on atlas stones. I want to do more of it but I have shied away from it because of issues I have been having with my back. I had absolutely no pain today, so I am going to look to do more stone training, as long as the weather allows it.

I have like 6 atlas stones. They range from like 200-lbs to 405-lbs. I got them all second hand and never really weighed any of them. One of my buddies weighed them when he was training for a contest a couple years back, but the elements have since worn them off so I have to guess at them now.

I wasn’t interested in pulling the stones without tacky. I had my eyes set on the 405-lb stone from the beginning, so I went ahead and wrapped my forearms with athletic tape and threw on some tacky.

I started out with the lightest stone, somewhere in the 200-lb range. Then I jumped up to a stone in the 285-lb range. Both of these were easy. The 360-lb stone came up pretty quickly as well. Pulling it to the lap was actually pretty easy, I thought. I then rocked and fired the stone up to the high chest.

Next, I rolled the 405 to the lifting area. The 405 is extra challenging because when it was made a lead insert block insert was put into it to make it heavier. That’s cool, of course, but the block isn’t centered so it makes the stone swivel as you try to lift it off the ground. It also causes some weird leverage forces as you try to load it, so it brings to meaning to the term odd object lifting.

I went after the 405 three times, giving it multiple attempts per try. Twice I got it up to my lap but just couldn’t quite keep it from slipping as I tried to load it to the high chest.

THE 405 WILL FALL NEXT TIME BROTHERS!!!

I am definitely out of practice. The first few pulls on the stones felt slow and cumbersome, but it wasn’t surprising because I think I trained stones one other time this year, if that. It felt awesome to get some work in on the stones today and look forward to more down the road!

To finish off the workout, I then tore one of the phone books I got while I was at OSU last week. They are like 1500 pages.

I couldn’t believe how tired my hands, wrists and forearms felt after lifting the stones. It was quite challenging keeping my grip on the book. It makes sense, since you have to clench the stones with an open hand and the forearms are under tension the whole entire time, but I either never thought about it before, or I just never tried tearing a phone book after atlas stone training before.

I shot plenty of footage today and zipped it all up into a video, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did shooting it.

Subscribe to my channel by clicking here ==> Jedd’s YouTube Channel

Here’s to more stone lifting in the near future,

-Jedd-

P.S. If you are serious about trying out atlas stone lifting, but aren’t sure how to get started, then check out our Stone Lifting Fundamentals DVD. Click here ==> Atlas Stone Lifting Technique DVD.

Articles You Might Also Like:

• Diesel Stone Lifting Chronicles – Part 1
• 7 Reasons to Start Lifting Stones
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• How to Begin Training with the Atlas Stones
• Cold Weather Training – Don’t Let The Cold Freeze Your Workout

Tags: atlas stone training, atlas stones, grip strength, hand strength, kettlebell lifting, kettlebell training, phone book tearing, stone lifting

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 11:41 pm and is filed under athletic strength training lift odd objects, old strongman feats of strength. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.